sent, and Carnac's share in the discussion
with his shrill voice and stumpy gestures would alone have sufficed to
have made it a memorable occasion. The later one had been read to the
daughter club of the ENQUIRERS, the SOCIAL ENQUIRERS, in the year after
White had gone down, and it was new to him.

Both these papers were folded flat and neatly docketed; they were rather
yellow and a little dog-eared, and with the outer sheet pencilled over
with puzzling or illegible scribblings, Benham's memoranda for his
reply. White took the earlier essay in his hand. At the head of the
first page was written in large letters, "Go slowly, speak to the man
at the back." It brought up memories of his own experiences, of rows of
gaslit faces, and of a friendly helpful voice that said, "Speak up?"

Of course this was what happened to every intelligent contemporary, this
encounter with ideas, this restatement and ventilation of the old truths
and the old heresies. Only in this way does a man make a view his own,
only so does he incorporate it. These are our real turning points.
The significant, the essential moments in the life of any one worth
consideration are surely these moments when for the first time he faces
towards certain broad ideas and certain broad facts. Life nowadays
consists of adventures among generalizations. In class-rooms after the
lecture, in studies in the small hours, among books or during solitary
walks, the drama of the modern career begins. Suddenly a man sees
his line, his intention. Yet though we are all of us writing long
novels--White's world was the literary world, and that is how it looked
to him--which profess to set out the lives of men, this part of the
journey, this crucial passage among the Sphinxes, is still done--when it
is done at all--slightly, evasively. Why?

White fell back on his professionalism. "It does not make a book. It
makes a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation."

But even as White said this to himself he knew it was wrong, and it slid
out of his thoughts again. Was not this objection to the play of ideas
merely the expression of that conservative instinct which fights for
every old convention? The traditional novel is a love story and takes
ideas for granted, it professes a hero but presents a heroine. And to
begin with at least, novels were written for the reading of heroines.
Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon the contents of a man's
head. That is just t